What my AI stack actually costs (the number is smaller than you think)

Hi Reader,

Here's my real AI bill, with the receipts.

Most "AI stack" posts are a list of logos. This is the invoice. Every line item, what it is for, and which ones I'd cancel tomorrow if the number moved.

What I pay every month (September 2026)

Claude Max, $200. The one I'd keep if I could only keep one. Every blog post, every audit, every line of the code that runs my sites goes through it.
Claude API, about $20. Powers the citation checks and the drafts my site writes for me. It ran dry on Wednesday and I found out because a script told me, not because a person did. That's the whole point of scripts.
Railway, about $10. Hosts two production Rails apps on SQLite. The bill used to be a Squarespace, a ConvertKit plan, and a GoHighLevel seat.
Amazon SES plus S3, under $5 combined. Email delivery and backups. Nobody brags about these, which is how you know they work.
Metricool, $18. Schedules everything to five networks. I tried to build this myself once. Don't.
DataForSEO, pay as you go, about $25 in a busy month. This is what replaced the tool below.
Perplexity API, a few dollars. It is how I know whether an AI engine cites my pages or my competitors'.
Kit, free plan. This email is going out on it.

Call it about $280 a month for a two-brand business that ships a new page every day. That $280 shipped a new page every day this month, and last Saturday was the site's best traffic day ever.

What I killed

Meta ads. Two weeks, a few hundred dollars, and one ad ate 99% of the spend while the other two got 30 impressions apiece. That isn't a test, it's a donation. I turned it off on September 1 and the traffic didn't notice.

SEMrush. $140 a month for one thing I couldn't replace: a zero-brand Gemini check. Then I counted. Gemini sent 39 visits in 90 days. I now do the same keyword work through DataForSEO for about a fifth of the price, so the SEMrush seat goes.

Here's what the list taught me, and it's the reason I'm sharing it. The seat prices didn't move all year. The metered ones did, quietly, on the vendor's pricing page, with a date on it. If your AI budget is a list of subscriptions, you're budgeting the wrong column.

STEAL THIS: the 10-minute stack audit

Open your card statement and list every AI line item. Not what you think you pay. What charged.
Next to each one write the last day you opened it. Anything over 30 days gets a question mark.
Mark which ones bill per seat and which bill per use. The per-use ones are where next year's surprise lives.
For each per-use tool, open its pricing page and search the page for the word "starting." If there's a date next to a number, put both in your 2027 budget today.
Cancel one question mark before you close the tab.

This week's AI tip: skip the spreadsheet. Paste the AI line items from your card statement into Claude or ChatGPT and ask: "Which of these bill per seat and which per use, and which of the per-use ones changed price in 2026?" That is steps 2 through 4 in one pass, and it takes about a minute.

If you want the version of this with every tool's sticker price next to its real heavy-use cost, the sheet I built for clients is free here: the Real AI Stack Cost Sheet. And if you would rather have a stack like this set up for your business than assemble it yourself, that is what the Claude for Small Business install is.

Reply with one number: how many AI subscriptions charged you last month? I'll tell you where you sit against the owners who've sent me theirs.

Talk soon,

Justin

justinmckelvey.com · LinkedIn · X · Blog

Justin McKelvey · Austin, TX

Justin McKelvey | Fractional CTO & AI Consultant

What my AI stack actually costs (the number is smaller than you think)

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